Cheesemaking at Site Alp

When we checked out of our hotel and waited for the local bus to town, we saw a lot of hang gliders in the early-morning sky preparing to land in a nearby field. Maybe the air currents are especially good in the morning?

This map shows our route for today. We begin in Interlaken (larger rectangle at the top right) and will spend 2 nights in Brig which is the small square on the right side of the map.

We boarded the Golden Pass Panoramic train to Spiez with a change in Zweisimmen. Our new group leader, Ursula, is just as talented in leading us where we need to be for our trains. 

Scenes along the way: 

 

 

We passed this hay wagon which collects hay for the cows. 

When we got off the train in Zweisimmen, we were greeted by this cow because this is one of the cheese-making areas of Switzerland. There are lots of cow farms to provide milk needed for the cheese.

The road to the Site-Alp farm

The Site-Alp cheese-making farm. Nadja, whose family owns the Site-Alp cheese-making farm (5,000 ft. up the alps), gave us a terrific introduction to cheese making.  

Cheese-making requites a strict schedule. They milk the 90 cows twice a day. Milk must be in the kitchen by 8 AM. They buy liquid rennet to add to it. Different kinds of bacteria makes different cheese. Holes in Swiss cheese come from gas. (This gas can also cause bad cheese.)

They use 600-1200 liters of milk a day to make the cheese. 16 tons of cheese ever summer from May to September. Good milk is essential. Even the best cheese man can't make good cheese with bad milk. A by-product is the whey. They have 150 pigs on the farm to eat up the whey!

The cheese takes 8 months to age. Every 3-4 week, they must turn and brush the cheese wheels with salt water. Each wheel weighs 22 kg. Soft cheese takes less time; harder cheese takes longer. 

The cows are in the barn during the day and out at night because it's cooler and there are less bugs. 

Above shows the inside of a cow barn. 

The milking process was interesting. First, you tie on the milking stool:

Then get the milking apparatus and have a seat on the stool to start milking.

They tie up the cow tails so that manure doesn't get near the udders. There are 40 cows and one bull (more than one and the bulls will fight). They must swap out the bull every other year as bulls get ornery as they age.

Here are the pig sties:

I was hoping to see pigs (and maybe piglets), but we didn't. 

Later, we had a delicious lunch which featured raclette cheese from the Site-Alp farm.

We are in the southeastern part of Switzerland, and the landscape has changed to lots of vineyards. There are still chalets - some quyite large as near/in Gstaad - but most of the land is devoted to grapes.